I was sitting on the couch when my 6-year-old son came up to me, asking for a hug. I froze. Lately, his neediness had been overwhelming, and I was frustrated.

I told him, “I’m not in the mood for a hug right now, buddy.”

He paused, then suddenly whispered, “It’s okay. Mommy says you don’t really love me anyway.”

It hit me like a brick to the chest. He wasn’t angry or even sad—just matter-of-fact, like he’d accepted it. I blinked at him, trying to process what I just heard.

“What did you say?” I asked, sitting up straight.
He looked down at his socks, toes wriggling into the carpet. “Nothing. I’ll go play in my room.”

My stomach flipped. I’d been divorced from his mom, Anara, for about a year. Things had been civil at first—joint custody, polite texts about school pickups, the usual rhythm of a broken family trying to hold it together. But in the last few months, something had shifted. My son, Kavi, had started pulling away. Not dramatically—just small things. Less eye contact. Less laughter. More cautiousness, like he was constantly checking if it was okay to be himself around me.

I sat there for a moment, unable to move. Then I went to his room.

Kavi was lying on his bed with his toy elephant tucked under one arm. I sat beside him, gently.
“Hey,” I said. “Can we talk for a sec?”

He nodded, still looking at the wall.

“You said something earlier. About Mommy saying I don’t love you. Did she really say that?”

He shrugged, still not meeting my eyes. “She just says stuff sometimes. Like how you didn’t want me anyway.”

I swear my heart cracked in half.

That night, after he fell asleep, I stood in the hallway for what felt like hours. Every part of me was screaming. I’d messed up. Not just today, but for months. I’d let the exhaustion of co-parenting and my own resentment toward Anara turn me into a version of myself I didn’t even recognize.

The next morning, I called in sick to work and took Kavi out for pancakes. We didn’t talk much at first. But when his mouth was full of whipped cream and strawberries, I tried again.

“I love you, Kavi. More than anything in the whole world.”

He gave me a crooked little smile and said, “Okay.” But his eyes didn’t quite believe me.

I knew this wouldn’t be fixed with pancakes or one nice morning. It was deeper than that. So I started trying harder.

Every week, I picked him up early one day and we’d do something small but fun—build a robot from junk, make pizza with weird toppings, go to the dollar store and buy the silliest stuff we could find.

Slowly, he started opening up again. But the things he told me over the next few months made my skin crawl.

“She says you only wanted to marry her because you were lonely.”

“She told me you’d probably forget about me when you meet someone new.”

“Sometimes she says you’re mad at me because I look like her.”

It was like a poison drip. Subtle, casual—just enough to seed doubt in a little boy’s heart.

I didn’t want to believe Anara could be doing this intentionally. We’d been friends once. We had Kavi on purpose. We went to therapy during our split and promised each other we’d never use him as leverage.

But something had changed in her. I think the loneliness hit her harder than she let on. She hadn’t started dating again, and she didn’t have much family around. I guess I was the one who looked like I’d moved on, even though I really hadn’t.

One day, I gently brought it up with her over the phone.
“Hey. Kavi’s been saying some things. Stuff that makes me think he’s getting… confused. I was wondering if we could talk about how we speak about each other around him.”

There was a long pause.

“You’re calling me a liar?” she snapped.

“No. I’m asking for us to be careful. That’s all.”

She hung up.

From that day forward, things got uglier.

She started cancelling my weekends with last-minute excuses—“He’s sick,” or “We have a birthday party.” She stopped replying to texts for hours, sometimes days. I’d go to his school to pick him up and be told, “His mom already got him.”

Eventually, I started documenting everything. Every missed visit. Every change in schedule. Every text. I wasn’t trying to build a case yet—I just wanted a record, in case things got worse.

They did.

That December, Anara sent me a message saying Kavi didn’t want to come for Christmas.
“He said he feels safer here.”

That was the moment I knew I had to do something.

I didn’t want to drag us into court. I knew it would hurt Kavi. But I couldn’t sit by while his mother filled his head with lies about me. I found a family mediator first, hoping we could avoid lawyers. But she refused to participate, said I was manipulating the situation.

So I hired a lawyer. The process was slow, expensive, and gut-wrenching. But I focused everything on one goal: shared custody, with clearer boundaries. I didn’t want to take Kavi away from his mother. I just wanted to be in his life fully again.

The court ordered an evaluation—interviews with both parents, observations with Kavi, even a home visit. I was terrified. What if I’d already lost too much ground? What if the months of coldness had sealed something in Kavi’s mind that couldn’t be undone?

Then something strange happened.

The evaluator pulled me aside after our third meeting and said, “Your son is deeply loyal to both of you. But he’s scared of making one parent mad by loving the other.”

That hit me like a ton of bricks. This wasn’t just about Anara’s words or my absence. It was about the war we’d accidentally made him fight every week.

By spring, the report came in. The evaluator recommended equal time with both parents, and that Kavi begin seeing a child therapist to help him navigate the tension. The judge agreed.

But that wasn’t the twist.

Two months after the ruling, Kavi and I were at a birthday party when I saw Anara’s cousin, Raina, walking toward me.

She looked nervous.

“I shouldn’t say anything,” she whispered, “but I want you to know something.”

Apparently, Anara had been in a pretty dark place for over a year. She’d been drinking a lot—something I hadn’t known—and had lost her job quietly after a series of absences. She’d been telling her family that I was “turning Kavi against her” and even accused me of stalking her, though there was no evidence of it.

“I think she needs help,” Raina said. “But she won’t admit it. She says she’s fine.”

The next time I dropped Kavi off, I watched Anara from the car as she opened the front door. She looked… hollow. Not angry. Just tired and small in a way I hadn’t seen before.

I waited a few days, then reached out.

I didn’t attack. I just said: “If you’re going through something, I’m willing to help. Not to win. Just for Kavi.”

She didn’t reply for three days. Then she sent me a voice note—broken voice, crying quietly.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I feel like I’m losing everything.”

We met for coffee the next week, at a quiet café halfway between our houses. It was weird. But it was also honest, for the first time in a long time.

She admitted that she had said things to Kavi she shouldn’t have. That she’d let her bitterness get the best of her. That she’d felt abandoned.

I told her I hadn’t moved on either. I was just trying to fake normal, the same way she was. We were two broken people raising a little boy who deserved better than our mess.

After that, things shifted.

We weren’t best friends. But we became allies.

We started doing monthly family dinners—awkward at first, then kind of fun. We went to his school concerts together. We clapped from the same row.

One night, as I tucked Kavi into bed, he whispered, “I like it better now. You and Mommy don’t hate each other anymore.”

I kissed his forehead and said, “Yeah. Me too.”

A year later, Anara called me in tears again—but this time, happy tears. She’d been sober for six months and had started working part-time again. She wanted to thank me. I didn’t deserve much credit. But I took the moment in.

Kavi’s nine now. He still asks for hugs. A lot. And now I never say no.

Because I know how it feels to miss a moment you’ll never get back.

Sometimes, people think being a parent is about being strong all the time. But the truth is, it’s about being present. About listening, apologizing, trying again even when you’re tired or hurt or scared.

It’s about choosing love even when it’s inconvenient.

So if you’re reading this and you’ve made mistakes—especially with your kid—it’s not too late. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to show up. Again and again.

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